Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ Coders ❯ Coders ( One-Shot )

Coders

[Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid][Death March Kindergarten]

Coding at a software company is methodical work. It requires some special software, a lot of coordination, and frequent testing to make sure each part of the code works. Really good coders use load-balancing software and exception handling to prevent errors from crashing the client’s computer. Quite a lot of modern coding was done with script or run-time rather than executable files, taking advantage of function calls and engines built into the operating system, particularly Java script and the various systems which arose after that, like Python. Code that works on lots of devices is key to success in modern times.

“Kobayashi, come drinking with us!” requested her coworkers. They’d just finished a project for a client and pushed it out to them through the salesrep who handled the deal. It should be a painless distro after all the work on it. A payment system for an online cellphone game, integrated with their launch website and their server cluster for downloads and module support, pay as you play. It was a popular model though Kobayashi was glad she wasn’t a gamer.

“C’mon. The clients are paying for the first round,” pointed out

“Hey. Nice to meet you. Suzuki Ichirou. Thanks for finishing this on time. I’ve been bashing out code and fixing bugs for the last four months. Sleep. I miss sleep!” said the man. Kobayashi sipped her beer and chatted with the man. He was kinda handsome, though she liked to think she wasn’t shallow. He bought her a shochou with ice and they sipped their drinks, talking coding and laughing a lot. After a while of that she found herself leaning on him and a bit more tipsy. She made a suggestion and so he kissed her and she liked it, so she made another suggestion and they walked a few blocks to a hotel, leaving their coworkers to their own party. It was… nice. It was a relief, though she wanted more. It had been a year since the last time, working too hard to date and so many guys were intimidated by her less than overtly feminine looks. Afterwards, cuddling together they made some promises to see each other again and exchanged numbers. Ichirou showered and swore at his phone beeping with a text.

“Are you kidding me?” he looked at the message again. He called a number. “What do you mean you need it fixed right now? Okay. Okay. Fine. I’ll be there in half an hour.” He sighed, shrugging. Kissed Kobayashi lingeringly, and slipped out. Kobayashi looked around the love hotel, showered herself, redressed in her work clothes and headed for a convenience store for a six pack of beer.

Sometime later, she fell asleep on the train and got off, pretty drunk, somewhere in the country, wandering away from the station and found a wounded dragon. One sword extracted and some kind words of compassion and she sort of passed out after that.

The following morning Kobayashi found herself in bed, wearing her bed clothes. She was very hung over. There was a tall glass of water and a pitcher by her bed. She drank a glass, refilled it, and drank a second one, then stumbled into her bathroom. The washing machine was running. She could smell… eggs, some kind of meat. And someone female humming.

This was how Kobayashi learned she was now the proud friend of a dragon maid named Tohru. Tohru cooked her meals, ironed her shirts, and changed her life. She was very genki and remarkably ignorant of the human world. She was also transformed into human, mostly human. People tended not to notice the horns or tail or wings, thinking she was dressed in cosplay. She even went shopping like that, and got a local fanbase in the market stalls. Tohrun was popular. It was very odd, even between her dates. Ichirou and Tohru hadn’t met yet. Kobayashi had been meeting him in various public places, and shifted from man-pants into a business skirt, which helped with certain aches.

There was one other detail. A couple more dates with Ichirou, dinners and tapered off due to demands from his work trying to finish the game he was unofficial project lead for. His boss was lazy and ignorant, a toolshed of useless blameshifting. She could relate. Their times together were better and more intense each time. Kobayashi hadn’t ever felt this way.

Two weeks after her last date with Ichirou, thanks to work demands, Kobayashi found herself feeling sick every morning. After a year without a date and then this sudden romance, she’d left off the birth control pills. It wasn’t like her to ignore an important detail. She realized what this meant and texted Ichirou with a request to meet him. Staring at the drugstore test with the big plus sign on it, and two more to prove the point, with an appointment to the clinic for next steps and more tests on her own health and the baby on the way. Kobayashi hadn’t thought about becoming a mother in years. When her looks failed to materialize as she matured she had imagined her personality wouldn’t get her a man either. She was wrong.

The following week with news to deliver to Ichirou and a lot of hope in her heart, she got an unfamiliar phone call from one of Ichirou’s friends at work. He was in the hospital, having collapsed from exhaustion. She gathered Tohru and went to the hospital to see him. They wouldn’t let her in the room because she wasn’t his wife or family. Ichirou’s older sister let her in, however, and she sat beside him and waited from the doctors to fix him. After a few hours he woke up.

“Wow. I just had the weirdest dream,” he said. “I was in the game, as a player, and got three thousand skill points after using a meteor swarm on a group of attacking lizardmen.”

“Lizardmen? Do you mean that was their race, their class, or their name?” interrupted Kobayashi, a hand resting on her abdomen. She wasn’t showing yet, but she found comfort in the action.

“Yes. All three,” he answered. His sister face palmed at this gamer joke. “After that I ended up saving an army from an attacking wyvern, bought some slave children and looked after them, got attacked by some kind of demon and ended up in a dungeon under the walled city, and then saved everyone trapped down there with us while getting my slave girls several levels of fighter. After that, I kept adopting children.”

“Do you like children?” asked Kobayashi.

“Yes. They’re amazing.”

“Good. We’re going to have one.”

“We’re what?” asked Ichirou. His sister’s head swiveled to me and looked up and down.

“A child. I am pregnant.”

“Kobayashi is with child?” asked Tohru.

“Is this your maid?” he asked her. She was dressed in a frilly maid uniform.

“Tohru, meet Ichirou. Ichirou is my boyfriend.”

“Want to get married, Kobayashi?” he asked her.

“Yes. Do you want to get married, Ichirou?” she asked him.

“Yes. Yes I would. That dream was really long. I think it was trying to tell me something.”

And so it was they got married and moved into a bigger place. Tohru was a decent maid looking after the home and cooking, though Kobayashi had to keep removing her glistening iridescent tail-meat. When the baby was born, they named her Neneko. Their infant daughter rapidly took to crawling under tables and climbing the sofa and various furniture once she was strong enough to hold up her head.

The various dragons who moved in with them, including the young dragon girl Kanna ended up going to school and being a big sister to little Neneko. With the real estate market in an affordable low, and a whole slew of houseguests, they opted to buy a multistory apartment building and rent it out, rather than risk Ichirou’s health on a game company that worked him so hard he hallucinated.

Between repair calls and upgrades to the basic 6 mat apartments, Ichirou started writing his own software. The loving parents and dragons doted on their little girl who grew up to be frumpy like her mom and suffered from a long term crush on one of their young tenants, attending high school with her. Having been raised about the supernatural looks of dragon girls, she was very sensitive about just how unfair it was for them to be so bouncy when she was flat and frumpy. It just wasn’t fair.

And so it was that Neneko gained the distinction of being one of the few girls-next-door to win her man in the end. Even if she did have to share him with some alien sexbot.